Thursday, October 03, 2013

Something Rotten In Denmark. For Pickup Artists

Pickup artists (PUAs) are men who believe in a cartoonish version of evolutionary psychology, where women are coy and need to be persuaded to have sex but want to have it only with something called "alpha males." Pickup artists view promiscuous sex as a game. They are the offense, the women are the defense (and the ball or puck), and the goal is to get laid as often as possible.

A courting game for misogynists, really. And it's a game because the rules require lying and pretending. It's misogynist because it's a hunt for pu**y, and the stand for it is mostly immaterial. And it's a game for men who feel cheated by mother nature in their looks, the society in their wealth, the women in their astonishing tendency not to always be available for sex as their underlying feelings of entitlement require them to be. Hence the need to invent rules to get laid by the reluctant women.

Now one of the better-known PUAs, Roosh, has written about his experiences in Denmark in his series about how to bang one's way around the world. He seems to have been "cockblocked" by the women in Hamlet's country! And he believes that the reason is Denmark's excellent welfare state which makes it unnecessary for women to bed unpleasant assholes just so that they can get someone to support them in marriage.

Thirty-three-year-old Daryush Valizadeh, known to his predominantly heterosexual male fan base as Roosh, is a well-known pick-up artist within the worldwide “Seduction Community,” which relies on pop evolutionary psychology to teach the art of getting laid.

...

Pick-up artists believe that all women are the same: submissive, choosier than men when picking sexual partners, entranced by shiny objects. In the Community, players are self-made; most renowned pick-up artists claim they were socially awkward losers until they learned the tricks of the trade. If a pick-up artist hones his “inner game” (confidence) as well as his “outer game” (appearance), he can control his sexual future. When women come with cheat codes, rejection is not an option; if a play fails, the player tweaks his strategy instead of conceding defeat.

Roosh enjoys middling success as the author of the “Bang” series of travel guides, which trains readers to seduce women based on derogatory ethnic stereotypes. In Bang Brazil, Roosh warns his followers that “poor favela chicks are very easy, but quality is a serious problem.” He vows never to return to the Polish city of Katowice unless forced to “maintain the pussy flow.” Roosh’s predations haven’t gone without recognition. The Southern Poverty Law Center, a civil rights organization, included Roosh’s personal blog in a March 2012 report on American hate groups; it quotes an Icelandic feminist group that described Bang Iceland as a “rape guide.”

But Roosh’s Denmark directory diverges from his usual frat-boy Casanova fantasies liberally seasoned with rape jokes. Don’t Bang Denmark—note the dramatic title change—is a cranky volume that (spoiler alert!) probably won’t help any Roosh acolytes score. Roosh calls it the “most angry book” he’s ever written. “This book is a warning of how bad things can get for a single man looking for beautiful, feminine, sexy women.”What’s blocking the pussy flow in Denmark? The country’s excellent social welfare services. Really.

Danish women “won’t defer to your masculinity,” he writes. “They can fuck you, but no more. What they do have are pussies and opinions you don’t really care about hearing. That’s it.” Advocates of Nordic social democracy should be thrilled to discover a perk of gender-equalizing work-family reconciliation policies: they combat skeeviness.Roosh comes to the conclusion that women who aren’t as dependent on men for financial support are not susceptible to the narcissistic salesmanship that constitutes phase one: “attraction.” That’s why Roosh fails to advance to the second level—”trust”—without being creepy. Thus “seduction” is almost always out of the question.

Roosh comes to the conclusion that women who aren’t as dependent on
men for financial support are not susceptible to the narcissistic
salesmanship that constitutes phase one: “attraction.”

But that refutes his evo-psycho theories about what women want! If women were hard-wired to go for the dominant growling alpha monkey, then women would do that even in Denmark. That they do not suggests that dating rules and what appeals to people is also culture-dependent and affected by economic realities.

Roosh's theories are inane, of course, and so is his welfare state theory (which, to repeat, conflicts with his evo-psycho theory). The reasons why Danish women won't go to bed with a particular PUA are probably far more nuanced. The way Danes talk to each other, the way women and men talk to each other, the way they date or don't date; all those are affected by culture, history and women's and men's roles over long time periods.

Here's the wider problem with the PUA experiment, even if we somehow lost our brains and accepted the basic misogynistic premises: There is no way of properly testing the PUA game against alternatives, other ways of seeking heterosexual experiences. There is no way to prove that acting like a PUA gets a man more pu**y than approaching someone with confidence, humor and kindness, say. I get that the Cinderella story among the PUAs is a rise from being a social outcast whom women ridiculed to being the one silver-back ape in the group and getting a carpal tunnel syndrome in the p**ck. But those are anecdotes, Cinderella stories, and attempts to sell books when presented by the authors.

They don't hold looks and personality etc. constant while changing the "game" of the man.

Support the Blog

More Ways To Support The Blog

About Me

For Readers Abroad

Permalink Notice

Because of changes created by Blogger, older permalinks to my archived posts no longer work. My apologies for that. The year-and-month in the old permalinks are correct, however, so you may be able to find the post you are looking for with some work. Alternatively, e-mail me for the currently functioning permalink.